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Disaster

Summary:

After the crash, the Doctor has a shutdown.

[Prompt 46 – Disaster]

Work Text:

The freighter explodes on the view screen, the blast so strong he feels it inside the TARDIS. Adric was inside there. And now he is dead.

Nyssa starts to cry, and Tegan puts her arms around her, but the Doctor doesn’t think to comfort them. Not that he would know how to anyway; he has always been poor at comforting people.

Adric’s badge lies in pieces on the floor. That badge just saved them from a Cyberman. Which means that, in a way, Adric saved their lives.

The dinosaurs were wiped out in that crash. The freighter hitting the Earth made the most successful species of all time go extinct. The blast was huge. At least Adric must have died quickly...

He feels numb.

Adric must have been still trying to crack that code. But he obviously didn’t do it in time... which means he must have died feeling like a failure. Was he scared? Did he wish he wasn’t going to die alone...?

Tegan is crying too, tears running down her face as Nyssa sobs into her shoulder. She looks at the Doctor, but she doesn’t say anything.

Part of the Doctor wants to cry, but he can’t work out how to do it. He wants to stim too, to flap and to smash his hands against the wall until his knuckles bleed just so he can feel something. He can’t seem to do anything. All he can do is stare blankly at the badge, the view screen, or his crying companions, whilst overwhelmed with numbness.

He is shutting down. He’s breaking. They are all breaking, and the badge is broken, and the freighter has crashed into the Earth and he wants to cry but he can’t and everything is wrong and broken and terrifying because Adric is dead.